Usability of new logs viewer

[Mark Cummins]

The old App Engine console is gone (sadness). The new logs viewer has improved a lot, but it's still frustrating compared to the old viewer.

Here are a few things which really bug me, I wonder if anyone has come up with work-arounds or solutions:

1) Collapse the metadata block [part in curly braces]

In the expanded view, every log shows the expanded metadata block in curly braces first. This consumes massive chunks of my screen real estate, while containing information that is mostly irrelevant most of the time. I'd like this block to be collapsed, so I can just see the info/warning/error messages that contain the useful information most of the time. That would allow me to much more quickly browse the logs and see useful information.

2) Disable auto-update on scroll

Generally I want to work with a block of logs for a while when diagnosing a problem. I find the auto-refresh on scroll unhelpful. As I scroll around new logs get loaded and it's easy to lose my place. The old paged view was much more practical. Is there a way to disable this?

Hopefully some people have work arounds, I really feel like I have no idea what's going on in my app any more now that we're forced to use the new viewer. Small UI differences have a big impact on usability. Colour scheme is also bad, but I have no hope of Google improving that.

[Christian F. Howes]

I too am having problems with the new log viewer, and have a p1 support ticket open with Google.  I have the same problems you list plus:

 - too many errors trying to load the logs pages
 - too slow to load the page
 - truncated user-agent string (this is a blocker for our use of the logs because the user-agent string tells us which client is connecting!)
 - less information in the collapsed view of the logs compared to the old console which tremendously slows down our scanning of the logs for issues.

i am disappointed that Google turned down the old viewer before full feature parity was achieved.

christian

[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hey Mark,

I've gone ahead and transformed your requests here into Feature Requests on the Public Issue Tracker for the Cloud Platform (first link, second link). Feel free to star those issues to receive updates whenever we have some to report. Feel free to use the issue tracker to post any Feature Requests or Bug Reports that you come across.

Cheers,

Nick
Cloud Platform Community Support

[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hey Christian,

If you can turn any of those into Feature Requests or Bug Reports in the Public Issue Tracker for the Cloud Platform, we'd be happy to handle them!

Cheers,

Nick
Cloud Platform Community Support

[Christian F. Howes]

Thanks Nick.

Most of them have been filed over there and been ignored for months. I
have also been told to not post information from my support tickets
publicly, so I will leave it to the support team to convert my internal
tickets to public items.

thanks,

Christian

On 7/8/16 12:51, 'Nick (Cloud Platform Support)' via Google App Engine
wrote:

> Hey Christian,
>
> If you can turn any of those into Feature Requests or Bug Reports in the Public
> Issue Tracker for the Cloud Platform

> <http://code.google.com/p/google-cloud-platform/issues/list>, we'd be happy

[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hey Christian,

I'm sorry to hear that you've felt the issues are ignored. Could you let me know the case #'s, and I'll take a look and see if we can provide a Public Issue Tracker thread for each relevant issue, so you and other users can follow updates? I'll also check what progress we've made on the issues and see if there's anything I can report.

Cheers!

Nick
Cloud Platform Community Support